The main reason for using a stack was reducing verbosity because for short scripts using variables felt unnecessary when the type-prefix of the command already communicates the variable contents. But it could still be a good idea to have a shorter syntax for assigned variables.
Accessing a variables works like this at the moment:
<selection-set-text $text="varname">
Keeping the dollar syntax, setting the return value to a named variable could look like this:
DOM bloat can certainly become a problem when adding lots of code in e.g. table rows. I added functions mainly to be able to move common code into a central place to minimize that problem.
You certainly must get used to the stack based approach. I tried to make it more approachable by making stack lookups type based (automatic search for value with matching type) and by using type-prefixed commands, e.g.
<request-send url="..."> // returns response
<response-get-text> // looks up response on the stack and returns string
<selection-set-text> // looks up string on the stack and writes it as text content to the current DOM element.
I think the approach of HTMX is that UI state is primarily managed by delegating DOM updates to the server and then modifying the DOM with the response.
With hyTags one can do a lot of things without server calls and without resorting to javascript (e.g. inserting and deleting new rows, showing a loading indicator, validating input, animations, ...).
For most tags you can also put the event handlers as first children inside the element, but self-closing tags like <input> don't support that. I'm now putting the event handlers always outside (as next siblings) for consistency.
It's only frontend logic. There is a small runtime that is implemented in Javascript interprets html tags. Backend logic needs to be implemented on the server.
The main reason for using tags was for me that they can be generated from a host language and stay readable, even for longer scripts. I'm using Swifts result builders for my projects, which enables autocompletion and partial type safety.
I'm using Swift Result Builders as a statically typed language to generate HtmlScript code (which a similar approach as html, the programming language):
So how does it work if a library owner changes something in his library—do they have to update all projects that depend on it and then push this as a single commit?
About half a year ago. It turned 1500 lines of Dart into ~10000 lines of Javascript. That might not be that much to handle for a webview but it was quite hard to debug. I used it as a UserScript in WKWebView so I couldn't use DartEditor. In comparison, the haxe code, which looked very similar to the Dart code, was compiled into 1400 lines of pretty readable Javascript.
I tried Dart when looking for a typed language that compiles to Javascript. It was nice but in the end I used haxe because it had a much smaller footprint. Dart seems to include its own library while haxe sticks close to what Javascript offers.
I don't think it's useful to extract every guard statement into a separate function. Consider importing a json file where each field could potentially contain invalid or missing data. Sure, you could create functions like parseTitle, parseSubtitle, parseAuthorName etc. but these functions will probably only be called from one place and I don't think they improve readability.
On the other hand, I do think that larger functions should be broken up into smaller parts where it makes sense, e.g. a separate function for parsing each object in the json example.
Accessing a variables works like this at the moment:
Keeping the dollar syntax, setting the return value to a named variable could look like this: